BEST ROUND OF GOLF IN MY LIFETIME

 

No Mulligans, either!!!!

 

Hill Top golf course in The Villages, Florida.

 

Drive #3 hit "Carts" sign, deflected toward the pin.

 

2nd shot on #4, the water hole, hit raised part of cart path, deflected toward the pin.

When the golf gods are on your side, just roll with it!

 

I've been playing golf for 75 years and I finally got a 30! At the age of 85!!!

 

Played with Paula and her brother, Tom, my partner in the Ohio senior leagues at Kent’s Sunny Hill and Cuyahoga Falls’ Brookledge, who can verify that I took NO mulligans.

 No 3-putt greens after FIVE 3-putt greens the day before at El Diablo.

 We teed off first, no one in front of us, no one for 3 holes behind us, so we set our own pace. Temperature was about 45 when we teed off, which explained why the course wasn’t crowded. But there was no wind, which helped. Skies were blue and sun was brilliant.

 

So was my golf game ... finally!

 

Sometimes the bear gets you; today, I got the bear!

 

Now if my luck can rub off on my Mountaineers tonight against Texas Tech in the Big 12 tournament I can die a happy man with Paula by my side.

 

This felt like the next best thing to sex. I do not know what I was doing differently, but the nectar of the gods was in my body.

 

I feel like I drank a gallon of moonshine!

 

As the shirt I wore said, "Mountaineers Climb Higher." Wow! Do NOT awaken me.

I want to save this euphoria.

 

We will be in Paula's house till late April when we return to our Ohio home in Tallmadge, an Akron suburb. We are in Florida for our usual four winterizing months.

We will take the auto/train from Samford, Florida to Lorton, Virginia, then drive the 2012 Honda Accord to Tallmadge.

Hot damn! Oh, what a feeling!

 

John Olesky (BJ 1969-1996)

 

I've waited a LONG time for this day!!!

 

I should either play the lottery or retire from golf, huh?

 

Doggone it, Stuart is a hero!

 

The Mad Hatter to the rescue!

Stuart Warner and wife Deb Van Tassel Warner were walking their dog, DeeDee, near their home in Phoenix, Arizona when they spotted a puppy swimming in the Western Canal.

The dog had plopped into the water 3 or 4 feet below its onshore takeoff spot. Keep in mind that Stu had his shoulder replacement surgery in July 2017.

Not a problem for Rescue Man!

Well, let Debbie, former BJ Features Editor and PD and Arizona editor, tell it:

“My hero, Stuart Warner! Nothing like starting the day off with some drama.

“On our morning walk with DeeDee, we spotted a creature swimming in the Western Canal. It turned out to be a puppy. No telling how long he had been in there.

“He came over to the bank when we saw him. It was a 3- to 4-foot drop from the bank into the water.

“We called the Humane Society but they took their sweet time getting there even though they were right around the corner from where we were.

“Stu finally got down on his belly, reached down as far as he could, grabbed the puppy by the scruff of his neck and pulled him out.”

Again, I remind you, Stu had shoulder replacement surgery eight months ago.

Debbie continues:

“Humane Society FINALLY arrived and brought his body temperature back up, found he was micro-chipped and were locating his owners.

“Oh, but Stu did drop his keys in the canal during the rescue.l. It turned out to be a puppy! No telling how long he’d been in there. He came over to the bank when he saw us, about a three-to-four foot drop. We called the Humane Society but they took their sweet time getting there even though they are right around the corner from where we were. Stu finally got down on his belly, reached down as far as he could, grabbed the pup by scruff of his neck and pulled him out. Humane Society FINALLY arrived and brought his body temp back up, found he was micro-chipped and were locating his owners. Oh, but Stu did drop his keys in the canal during the rescue! All’s well that ends well.WWWWWe

“All’s well that ends well.”

Just consider it friendly karma payback for the folks at the Quaker Hilton Hotel in Akron who gave Stu a second key when he walked outside his room and the door slammed shut behind him.

To the folks behind the reception desk it was just another guy dressed only in his tidy whity short who wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Maybe they didn’t recognized him without the ever-present hat, which I suspect was hiding a secret Stu didn’t want anyone to know.

Stu is marshaling the troops for the Arizona New Times these days, investigating the crap out of things that people in power would prefer to stay hidden.

Stu and Deb’s daughter, Denise Warner, is editorial director/digital at Billboard, which has been serving the music entertainment business since 1894.

Emilie Warner Clemmens and Amanda Warner Poynter are their other daughters. Emilie and Amanda live in Lexington, Kentucky, Stuart’s old haunt. The daughters are the parents of four of Stu and Deb’s grandchildren.

Stu and Deb have been married 35 years. They first met on Friday night, May 22, 1982 and moved in together the following Monday.  

They married on September 25, 1982.

Stuart came to the Beacon Journal after 10 years with Knight-Ridder's Lexington newspaper. He was at the BJ from 1979 until 1999. His last Warner’s Corner column was written in 1990 if you don’t count the 175^th BJ anniversary column that was a one-day affair.

 

He left the BJ for the PD. By the time he took a PD buyout in 2008, he was writing coach and projects editor, similar to his role at the BJ.

 

Stuart, after four years with the Arizona Republic, in January became editor-in-chief of the weekly Phoenix New Times in Arizona, which has gone online with some impressive investigative reporting.

He is in the Cleveland Press Club Hall of Fame and a former Case Western Reserve full-time lecturer.

 

Stuart and wife Debbie Van Tassel, the whip-cracking department chief during her BJ days, left Cleveland for Arizona in 2013.

 

New Jersey native and Seton Hall graduate Debbie, at the BJ till 1999, was assistant managing editor/features at the PD before going to the Arizona Republic, where she was laid off despite some spectacular success there because money is more valuable than people in today’s newspaper world.

Debbie had a hand in three Pulitzers, including at the BJ with the Goodyear greenmail saga and A Question of Color; and the Boeing 737 crash in Seattle while she was working for the paper in the rainy city.

Trivia note: Stuart went to Lafayette High School in Kentucky with Mike Wanchic, lead guitarist for the John Mellencamp band.

 Later, Debbie reported:
 

"The dog's owners were located. They live in Tucson. I'm really having trouble wrapping my head around how this puppy came to be swimming in a canal 120 miles away."

 

 

Fire destroys Beacon building

Did the headline startle you?

Well, it did the same thing to Dave Scott, former deputy business editor and regional issues reporter at the BJ.

It was a “scary moment at the gym,” Dave said, because the TV “Screen said Beacon roof collapsed in a fire.”

False alarm.

It was a “Beacon Building,” but not the one owned by David Black’s Canadian company. It was an abandoned building on North Howard Street in Akron. Apparently someone or some firm with Beacon in its name. The building burned to the ground and is a total loss.

The structure went up in 1913 but hadn’t been used for years.

North Howard was closed in both directions between Cuyahoga Falls and Tallmadge Avenue.

No one was injured in the fire.

Last month Mark J. Price, the excellent reporter of historical events for the BJ, wrote about two Howard Street buildings collapsing in an 1891 disaster.

Two shops occupied adjacent three-story buildings on the west side of South Howard Street in downtown. The stores were south of the West Market Street crossroads of Hall’s Corners, an intersection that no longer exists today but served for a century as the center of the retail district.

The buildings housed Shepherd B. Lafferty’s Model Bakery, a dining hall, lunch counter and confectionery, and, next door, Herrick & Son, which specialized in “wholesale and retail china, glassware, crockery, stoneware, fruit jars and lamps of every description.”

Both structures were built after a major fire destroyed earlier businesses on Howard Street in 1852. A heavy wall separated the two stores.

No one was killed in the collapse of the buildings, except for a horse that had been hitched to a post in front of the stores.

Damage was more than $50,000 — about $1.3 million today.

Herrick & Son reopened two days later on Main Street in a vacant room at the Academy of Music. Lafferty reopened at a Market Street storefront.

The Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. bought the disaster site and built a grocery that operated for decades. The entire block came crashing down when Akron razed South Howard buildings for 1960s urban renewal.

Today, the site of the 1891 disaster rests near the parking garage at the back of the Federal Building.